Month: August 2009

I just begin thinking about how our understanding of what a country should do should be use to “govern” our self better and live a better (=richer) life.

What’s wrong?

For example, countries that peg prices go bankcrupt because bad price send the wrong signal. How many of us do the same thing.

When we get richer the price of our time go up. When we work hard, the marginal cost of working one additional hour go up again. Yet we keep working and working. Why? Because we peg the price of our time when we’re still poor.

Countries don’t get richer from working harder. Countries get richer from having the proper and natural price system (i.e. market). The same way we should avoid excess and produce what’s necessary (have high marginal value). At the optimum, the marginal rate of substitution between all endeavor should be the same. Just like in free market country.

Maybe just like countries should embrace free market, we should trade off our time well.

Maybe just like countries should kill their criminals, we should let go part of our self, that want to screw others. At least most part of it. On the other hand, we shouldn’t blame ourself for being vengeful because that part of us does have it’s use, if not excessive.

Often smart people acts like an idiot. Often, perhaps, it’s us that simply misunderstood their true goal.

The Arabs, have so many lands. Yet they keep waging war with Israel over a small piece of land. That’s not unique to Arabs.

Criminals in US kill far more people than terrorists, yet US would want to spend far more money killing terrorists rather than killing criminals. Israel do not even have death penalty but is pretty liberal when bombing Lebanon.

If the sole purpose of all those wars is to protect the innocents’ right, decision making theory should suggest that all those countries should spend more resources fighting evil inside first rather than evil outside. They should, for example, have more death penalty and less war. And all countries will be better off.

The fact that it’s not the case shows that there are other motives. One motive is preference to kill someone outside. More death penalty means antagonizing and killing fellow citizens.

The same with Arab. Killing terrorists means fighting their own kind. It makes more sense to channel all those extra sperms against richer neighbor with different ideology.

Channeling anger somewhere else is the way politicians get their pay check and when every other countries are like that too, it’s arguable that it’s also their people’s best interest to behave the same way.

The way we evolve is when we’re not at war we’re in a competition. Many do not like free fair competition. So somebody got to be the enemy. Good politicians are the one that can then channel that somewhere else.

Should we vanquish evil inside or evil outside? Which one is more profitable? It depends on our neighbor. Lebanon is a good sample. The country practice free market but got bombs anyway and has to deal with Palestine’s refugees’ problem. If prosperity is the aim, then it’s easy to see how Lebanon would improve their wealth by spending more on defense budget.

Morale: If everyone else is asshole, we should cherish evil inside against evil outside. If everyone else is nice, it’s more appropriate to vanquish evil inside.

Which is another important reason to aim to live among nice neighbor.

Here is another morale. If rather than judging we just try to understand, we can learn alot. After all those politicians are just like us, only way smarter and more rational. Whatever they do must have been a very effective to achieve their goal. It’s just that we think they’re an idiot because we misunderstood their goal.